A few weeks ago,, I called a friend who works with Brian Wilson to see about photographing the Beach Boys when the played in Chicago for two nights. After a few emails back and forth, I was told that I could shoot the whole show from wherever I needed to on both nights. So off I went. I knew that this was going to be a tough shoot as the guys are spread across the entire stage. BUT… while having dinner with a New York based journalist who was in for the show, I found out that the guys started out the second set standing around Brian Wilson’s white baby grand! At that moment, I knew that the whole night rested on those five minutes!
Before the show, I walked up and down a few aisles and picked a few location/lens combinations. Most of the rest of the show was spent shooting individual shots of the 15 people on stage, but starting off the second set each night, I had the perfect shot at the “money shot.”
Over the course of the two days, I shot about twenty shots from two different angles. All the other photographers were already home by the time these shots were taken, and even if they were allowed to shoot they would have been shooting from the back of the hall and wouldn’t have gotten a good angle anyway. Pretty much proves the point that shooting the first three songs from the back will never produce a winner.
Case in point- last week, I had a photo in Newsweek and another in Rolling Stone. Probably many more that I won’t know about till my next sales report comes in.